Brontës in the tech age

Spurred by the upcoming adaptation of Cranford, Andrew Billen from The Times wonders about screen adaptations of literary works, and whether it's worth it to film the same work several times. A couple of mentions are made to last year's Jane Eyre and next year's ITV take on Wuthering Heights (Next year [ITV] makes Wuthering Heights, just nine years after its last version)

But how much, except at the margins, can each new version add? Two years ago Bleak House broke the mould by becoming a “soap”, going out in twice-weekly half hours; Oliver Twist will follow its frequency. There are reinterpretations to make. Sandy Welch adapting the BBC’s Jane Eyre last year emphasised more than is usual the heroine’s time away fromThornfield Hall and had Jane eventually succumb to Rochester only after first giving the MCP a good ticking off. Davies’s A Room With a View revved up the class war latent in Forster’s novel and strongly hinted that Cecil Vyse was not the marrying type because he was, well, gay.
We may harbour hopes, too, for ITV’s Wuthering Heights since it has been written by Peter Bowker, who, with great originality, wrote the BBC’s musical thriller Blackpool. But Bowker must know his main job is to deliver viewers and prestige to ITV. As Laura Mackie, ITV’s new head ofdrama, says: “I would struggle to point to a definitive TV version of Wuthering Heights, in the way you can with Andrew Davies’s Pride and Prejudice. That’s a challenge for us, to try and do the definitive version.”

We certainly hope this new version of Wuthering Heights will bring good things. However, we have our doubts that there are such things as definitive adaptations, seeing as how these largely depend on the spectator's taste and appreciation, not uniquely on its merits as far as the film is concerned. Of all the many versions of Jane Eyre, for instance, people widely differ in which is their 'definitive' adaptation for them after all. By the way, the most recent version is aired next Sunday November 25 and December 2 in Australia, on ABC.

Los Angeles Times reviews Ravish by Rosanna Gamson, on stage at the new LATC in Los Angeles:

In 'Ravish,' the Brontës are thrust into the tech age
The one-hour piece, choreographed by Rosanna Gamson, is heroically performed, but gadgets steal the focus.
By Lewis Segal, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

The floor is the star of the hourlong dance drama "Ravish" at the New LATC through Sunday. Sometimes it's outlined in intense golden light, but it's just as likely to turn into a giant dining room table or sketch-pad or bed, thanks to Barnaby Levy's video projections. At one point, it even becomes a phantom ballroom with ghostly dancers whirling across it.
But in the most innovative effects, interactive technology from Flavia Sparacino's Sensing Places LLC makes the floor into a moving grid or web reflecting every step by the five dancers in the locally based company Rosanna Gamson/World Wide.
And there's more: As Carin Noland begins to dance early in the piece, single letters appear under her feet, spelling "Burnt" over and over. The letters, words and full texts also periodically appear on the back wall, often as mere flashes, punctuating the choreography, bombarding the audience.
The dancers don't stand a chance against the onslaught, though they performed heroically at the work's premiere Thursday. The novel visual spectacle is too commanding and Gamson's choreography too un-relievedly flung out and unmodulated.
Performed in an intense flail-and-sprawl modern dance style, "Ravish" is especially unconvincing as a collective biography of the Brontë family, doomed literary lions of the 19th century in England. In Gamson's action plan, there's no room for the life of the mind, so what we read from or about the Brontës on the wall or floor never conceptually connects with the dancing we see, and it's impossible to believe that these hyperactive, volatile people might have written those words, any words.
Although Gamson does construct group passages that convincingly unite everyone as a family, the characterizations remain rudimentary, and only when the Brontës begin to die off, one by one in furious solos followed by slow walks into the Great Beyond, does the narrative assume a coherent shape.
Russian choreographer Boris Eifman ran into similar problems recently with his ballet "The Seagull," emphasizing over-the-top physicality to the point of narrative confusion. But he was portraying mediocre artists and Gamson is depicting great ones -- so implausibly, as it turns out, that "Ravish" is best viewed as an abstraction or company showpiece.
As such it never bores -- not with the cast's skill and commitment. The sweetly lyrical Marissa Labog is perhaps the company's most astute dancing actor and Michael Gomez its greatest asset when space-devouring virtuosity is needed. Watch them shine in solo after solo.
Other expressive colors enrich the work through a sunny portrayal by Noland, a withdrawn one by Lilia Lopez and a manic depressive one by Sarah Goodrich. Gamson may never reveal which of these Brontë women supposedly wrote "Jane Eyre" and which "Wuthering Heights," but no matter. As dancers, they're all faultless and often surprisingly versatile, as when they suddenly turn up in toe shoes, executing bourrées in a circle while whirling chiffon capes.
Don't ask what it means. It's picturesque and distinctive while it lasts, and that's the most you should expect from "Ravish."
Rob Bailis created the collage of sounds and varied musical excerpts (all uncredited) accompanying the piece. Ted Mather designed the equally changeable lighting effects, Lopez the once elegant but mostly torn and shabby costumes the Brontës wear in decline. This is one event where choreography takes a back seat to nearly every other component of dance theater, so the excellence of Gamson's collaborators accounts for most of the excitement in Theater 3.

The UDaily (from the University of Delaware) reports a recent lecture given at the University by Maurice Corrigan, author of Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading!:

Maureen Corrigan, National Public Radio (NPR) book critic, author and lecturer on literature at Georgetown University, addressed an audience of approximately 100 UD students, faculty and members of the Newark community Thursday night, Nov. 8, in her lecture, “Ain't No Mountain High Enough: Women's Extreme Adventure Stories,” given in the Trabant University Center Theatre.
Sponsored by UD's Women's Studies Program, Corrigan's lecture, the second in the Mae and Robert Carter Lecture Series, focused on women's adventure stories, particularly those written by late 18th-century and early 19th-century authors Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë‘. (...)
Corrigan went on to examine how heroines from 19th-century literature--even heroines from such different authors as Jane Austen, with her social satires, to Charlotte Brontë‘, with her gothic gloom--“took emotional adventures of endurance.” And though these adventures, she said, might have taken place in parlors and kitchens and bedrooms and involved the care of sick parents or the terrors of the marriage market, they nonetheless “were devoted to a woman quietly keeping her nerve, day after day, year after year. Climbing Mount Everest looks like a snap compared to the quotidian pain of caring for a sick parent,” Corrigan said. (Becca Hutchinson)

Lorna Luft, actor and singer, chooses her favourite things for The Scotsman:

IF IT'S Sunday and raining out, I want to watch Rebecca. If I really want to laugh I'll watch The Producers, and if I want to cry I'll watch the original Wuthering Heights.

On the blogosphere today: to the lighthouse briefly comments Claire Boylan's Emma Brown. We have discovered this new blog: Austen and Bronte and Gaskell, Oh My! Its description promises interesting posts in the future:

If you ask any of my friends or anyone that knows me at all, then you would know that I am obsessed with Jane Austen, especially Pride and Prejudice. By looking at the female protagonists from works of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte and Elizabeth Gaskell, I will explore the strengths and weaknesses that make them classics and revolutionaries.

Categories: Books, Dance, Jane Eyre, Movies-DVD-TV, Sequels, Talks, Websites, Wuthering Heights